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Here's a bit o' history of cars in video games:
From Wipeout to Ridge Racer to Motorhead, the original PlayStation marked the inflection point where home console hardware finally caught up with the outsized ambitions of simulation-minded developers everywhere. At the same time, the success of classics like Gran Turismo on the sales charts helped cement the genre as a commercial force. But it was 1994’s Road and Track Presents: The Need for Speed—a mouthful of a title, especially for the starting point of a much-vaunted franchise—that served as one of the very first truly excellent home driving games. Developed by EA and originally consigned to the doomed early disc-based machine known as the 3DO, art lead Markus Tessmann distinctly recalls working around both the strict hardware limitations of the ailing console and the somewhat-strained budget assigned to the unproven team.
According to Tessmann, EA had cajoled him out of his decade-long career making top-flight 3D graphics for feature films and commercials with the promise that his expertise would help them make cutting-edge 3D games. But after etching a handful of traditional pixel-art games for the Sega Genesis, Tessmann began to grow exasperated. That is, until he heard about their next project. “They told us that they wanted us to make a driving game for the 3DO, and I thought that was great,” he says. “But then they told us that they wanted it to be a 2D game similar to Sega’s OutRun, or the hit game of the time, Road Rash. Just 2D bitmaps of cars that we’d scale, to give the illusion of depth. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? That makes no sense. It’s the 3DO, not the 2DO.”
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:37PM
The irony is that's how DriveClub works on a PS4-VR, but cars with good enough visibility to check their blind spots usually aren't the cars people want to drive. Or maybe rephrased, I can drive a truck in Spintires almost as well as a professional truck driver solely because I have external camera view while a professional driver can back up and so on just as well solely using eyes in the driver seat, which is 1000x harder. So a VR version of Spintires would be much less fun than non-VR because only experienced CDL holders could actually drive the darn truck in the VR version.
I got to play battlezone for a couple hours with the same PS-VR I tried for Driveclub and the biggest immersion win seems to be micromovements of head (like less than 20 degrees) naturally should result in the picture changing, as it does. Battlezone was not a very aerobic game in the sense of flailing around like the "Job Simulator" VR game, but the VR made it much more immersive.
Right now the main issue with VR is no clear message from programmers, mfgrs, or gamers on what the want and how to answer the argument of VR is for funky dance aerobics like job simulator or if it should be a unfortunately very expensive immersion aid like drvieclub or battlezone.
I am unfamiliar with how the vivecraft project implements VR for minecraft. If they use the model of having to physically turn your body 180 degrees to turn around and physically jump in order to virtually jump, it'll be described as authentic and cool and nobody will tolerate playing it more than a couple minutes because oddly enough manual mining is exhausting work. Yet if they implement it for micromovements and you still use keyboard/mouse to move your in-game body and do stuff, then people will say its not as cool and not technologically impressive or maybe not even call it VR, but they'll play it for 100 hours per week because the immersion would be awesome.
Maybe a simplification of the problem is nobody involved in VR knows if VR is supposed to be driven as "mouse look" or "movement keys" and there's a lot of people throwing a lot of money into hardware designs assuming one or the other. For example a boring accelerometer is "good enough" for mouselook, but you need elaborate 6D IMU spatial positioning technology to do VR-as-movement keys. Or another example, PS4-VR from last year or years ago or whatever is wired... people into VR as mouselook think wired is fine, the wire never gets in the way and my neck doesn't have to support heavy batteries and the wire is more than adequate for motionless body while head turns around or looks up occasionally. But people into VR-as-movement-keys rightly freak out over wires as they're going to trip fall or otherwise destroy the wire or hurt themselves as they do VR zumba or VR aerobics.